Interlude XLII. A break, almost

City planning + Like a dog... + We in ourselves + Joy Luck + Kant

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLI. Foucault - part 21

A break from Kant and Foucault, for the most part.

City planning.

I’ve lost track of the number of building booms I’ve witnessed here. For the past several, I’ve thought, “Probably only one or two more before all the obvious locations for urban infill will be filled and they will have to start attacking the substance of the city. And I found myself thinking the same thing today. But this time around they are actually redeveloping a number of unfortunate developments from the 1950s and 1960s -- buildings that I’ve hated since I moved here. Which brings up the possibility of one generation destroying the creations of the previous generation. (Unfortunately for a juicy Freudian interpretation like this, the chronology of all this doesn’t quite fit together. If you wanted to give a human face to the ill-advised urban development of the mid-20th century that face would have to belong to the “master builder” Robert Moses (1888 – 1981). While he didn’t build anything here, he was the model for similar figures in every other urban area. A quick look at his dates show that he was of my grandfather’s generation, not my father's.)

If it weren’t for Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) you could say that it takes a generation or two to question and finally reject the ill conceived notions of one generation. Instead, it just takes several generations to build up the political will to undo the malpractice committed against cities. In our case, the dream of the generation of Robert Moses was for a lower density, more suburban “Tomorrow.” Today the desire is for a higher density, more “Urban” urban environment, and money is available to demolish the old and to replace it with something that does what cities are supposed to do: serve the maximum number of people in the most convenient manner -- no automobiles needed.

Of course this isn’t a declaration of total victory in the wars of urban planning. The mistakes of the past can be blotted out and replaced by successes much easier in places where the street grid was not altered or obliterated. It’s one thing to repair an architectural abscess in an otherwise functioning neighborhood, it is another thing entirely to address a district that has been clear-cut. There are currently a number of neighborhood-scale development projects planned or already begun here and they are all cursed with poor granularity (too many big buildings and not enough smaller ones -- and I’m talking about acreage not height) and also by generic design. It will be almost impossible to repair these neighborhoods without completely razing them and starting from scratch.

Jane Jacobs maintained that it was impossible to construct a good urban neighborhood from scratch, and no one has yet proved her wrong (that I’m aware of). I don’t think it’s theoretically impossible, but you would have to have the authority of Robert Moses together with the insight of Jane Jacobs to pull it off -- an unlikely combination of attributes. Of course I’ve considered how you would go about this task. You would have to leave gaps in the developed environment that could be filled in later, phase by phase, over a considerable length of time. But you can’t leave voids, so you would need to initially fill those gaps with temporary, less dense, less costly structures. Today, those gaps would be full of shipping container and tent based architecture housing functionality that can’t afford the rents of new, urban construction.

But even I, in my imaginary planning, tend to screw up the granularity. It is so tempting to design big. And yet people, as consumers, almost always prefer the smaller, more manageable and manipulable buildings and spaces. That putting in streets (and relatively small blocks) and then simply marking off medium sized lots and selling them to be developed at random, might be the best way to conduct “urban planning” seems to be an inconceivable idea these days.

Like a dog to his...

Why is it so hard to drag yourself to the gym even though you are always so happy you exercised afterwards? Often just the opposite of drinking. I’m usually pretty good, but this week I took advantage of possibly catching a cold (false alarm) and bad weather to interrupt my usual, every other day, schedule. Today I only went because we have a break in the weather and I really had no good reason not to go. I tried to talk myself out of going on the basis of it’s being an interruption of my staycation -- and there is some validity to that as I have since fallen into my usual habits and fixed my usual lunch at home and am now back at the Bank Cafe even though it was my plan to go places I don’t usually visit. Still, I’ll make that up at dinner and I do feel better.

And anyway, who spends time on any kind of a holiday (stay-cation or not) studying transcendental idealism? Maybe I do have a masochistic streak like Foucault after all. (This is the "dog" part.)

Putting together my overview of Kant (and Hume and Descartes) has been interesting in that it has involved digging up ideas and terminology I haven’t disturbed for 40 years. I say “disturbed” because they are like shrapnel embedded in my mind, quietly festering, that I’m now finally attempting to deal with. I did a remarkable job of blanking most of this out (PTSD comes to mind as I write this) but encountering concepts like “categorical imperative” again brings such an odd feeling of familiarity. I had forgotten that the categorical imperative was supposed to be a way of working around problems with the “golden rule” (with S/M, for example). But reviewing the matter again, it seems to me that his “improvement” is more formal than real. As I understand him (something you have to say with all these damn people) the categorical imperative looks only at the consequences of universalizing some rule of behavior, ignoring the subjective feelings of the possible object of some behavior. This allows you to come up with unproblematic statements (though I seem to disagree with Kant much of the time), but it is uninterested in how happy people would be were these maxims to be actually universalized.

I can’t help thinking of the typical German categorical imperative “obey pedestrian walk/don’t walk signals.” I am blessed -- and cursed -- with around 50% German genes, so I am sympathetic to this maxim, but even I have tweaked it as follows: “obey pedestrian signals, unless you can see that there is no traffic for a block (since it is rude to walk across the street in front of drivers who have a green light, but also silly to just stand on the corner when there is no traffic at all.)

Similarly, I can imagine the computer code Kant would write, cautious (and slow) to a fault. I would go so far as to say the concept of the categorical imperative is against nature. By which I mean that nature, through the workings of natural selection, is constantly working to refine and improve the imperatives written into the DNA of life. Natural selection is a process of adding if-then clauses to basic maxims like “obey traffic signals” -- modifications that speed things along without killing off an unacceptable number of people. It would probably be better to say that nature doesn’t even aim at categorical imperatives but simply aims at finding a rule that works for the most part.

Or lets put it this way, the consequences of humanity’s adopting the categorical imperative as an actual rule of decision making, would be ghastly. Applying it to Nature would be even worse. So doesn’t that negate the entire concept?

We in ourselves.

It occurred to me today, while I was sitting in a little vegan restaurant on the edge of Chinatown, watching the weekend foot-traffic pass by and contemplating (as one will) Kant's "the thing in itself," that this idea, with a bit of a twist, works especially well when considering the human subset of "things." We attempt to "know" people by the visual and behavioral clues they provide us: their dress and appearance, perhaps the car they drive or the smartphone they use, their manners, their conversation, even the people they associate with.

Unlike other "things" (one supposes), people can attempt to deceive us. Appearances may not be what they seem (think politicians and con artists here) but there are many less dramatic cases of deception: The person with a more expensive car than they can afford, or with trendy books they either don't read or read superficially (not like me). The people who live surrounded by a regimented state of order because, inside, there is chaos.

Either we admit that we can never really know a person, or we find ourselves frequently surprised by the latest revelation. And isn't this also true when it comes to self-knowledge? We wonder, or else are shocked to discover, what we are really like (what we are capable of) in some situation that we have never experienced before (frustrated love, betrayal, threat to loved one, etc.)

Joy Luck.

Tonight, in accordance with my firm (yet mysterious) staycation rules, I dined at a restaurant I rarely visit on my favorite block of the city. I ignored two Thai restaurants and went for an Indonesian place I haven’t been to in I don’t know how long. There used to be two Indonesian restaurants and this, according to my Indonesian-Chinese friend, was the lesser of the two. (There was also a Burmese place that made the best green bean dish I’ve ever had -- this is where I sympathize with the people decrying the lessening diversity in the city.)

Tonight the place was mostly full of Asian families. I was repeatedly reminded of The Joy Luck Club (probably the best book and film about living in San Francisco). The distinction between the generations raised here, and the generations that moved here, could not be more pronounced. Given the difficulty some ethnicities have getting acclimated (I’m thinking of the Somalis here) how quickly Asian kids with immigrant parents become American kids who happen to speak Cantonese, is astonishing. Yes, they still have issues around automobiles, but culturally they blend in as well as anyone.

Kant.

This Kant section has taken longer and been less satisfying than any other part of this blog.  In a way that makes sense since I’m trying to cover way too much ground -- but the other aspect is that, not only am I not sure I know what they’re talking about, they often seem just as confused about each other and possibly about themselves. I’m noticing a trend of thinkers (Heidegger and Kant) trashing people (Sartre and Fichte) who believe themselves to be following in the trashers footsteps. What does it say about philosophy that the guy with tertiary syphilis seems to be the easiest to grasp. (I now doubt that popular diagnosis but it's such a good line...) Even if we grant that what they are talking about is inherently hard (and possibly impossible) to express, they seem to have an idea in mind that they are keen to communicate and yet they so often fail at this even when addressing the initiated members of their little secret society.

The idea, from Aristotle, that Plato maintained a cache of core ideas that he didn’t write about, because written language was inadequate to the task, is certainly thought provoking (see Wiki). There are also, of course, things -- like that the concept of God seems to be something people want to believe -- that even most philosophers have left alone because they still have to live in the world.

It may not be fair, but, once again I come away from an attempt to “get” Kant with little satisfaction, but also, and again, with the impression that there really isn’t anything here I need to get. To put Kant in the context of The Magic Mountain, I suspect that throwing him into the mix of Settembrini and Naphtha would not have added anything and that he, too, would have been humbled by the personality of Peeperkorn. In fact one of Peeperkorn’s elliptical declarations might be the best response to Kant... “Fine, Gentlemen, agreed, excellent!... let me say that -- by all means! Eminently important! Eminently controversial!... settled, ladies and gentlemen!” Followed by a glass of gin.

Next: Interlude XLIII. Foucault - part 22.

Spring XVIII. The Literary life + fitness

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XVII. Why we read

Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise unhurried, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading, all day long? Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a long year?

I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained world. It would make me miserable, and to what purpose? Yet, having once looked that way, think of them I must. Oh, you heavy-laden, who at this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread! [Is he playing with Cockney Rhyming Slang here? It works either way, but he could be playing on both meanings of “bread.”] Year after year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling, exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and heart-breaking! ...

With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to “literature,” commits no less than a crime... Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh, your prices per thousand words! Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits those downtrodden in the fray...

Alpha.

This reminds me that when I first moved here it was with the intention of becoming a writer. I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that “creative” writing was the sort of thing you should do only if you were either astonishingly talented or even more astonishingly determined. Since I felt I could let that dream go, I did so.

A decade later I was briefly a technical writer of computer books and found it to be deadly work. I have never regretted my original decision to abandon my literary dreams.

Beta.

This morning I rose early and went to the gym for my usual workout, only I was feeling ambitious so I doubled virtually everything. I’m supposed to do this more frequently but, especially during greening season, I tend to stick with my shorter workout. I then went home, showered and ate a light lunch. Now I’m sitting at one of my free WiFi cafes that is also a bank. Soon I will start reading, but just now I’m merely sitting here feeling pleasantly relaxed from my workout. I started exercising to strengthen by back (and core) and now I continue and even increase my routine so that I can do my physically demanding greening work -- bags of compost and recycling are not always light. But this delightful feeling one has after a good workout is a bonus I would now be reluctant to give up. "Good Luck, Bad Luck," again. If not for my bad back I would never have started doing something that turns out to give me a surprising amount of pleasure.

I do wonder sometimes, while I sit in this very modern space -- the building is on a corner and this space is double height with mostly windows on the two street sides, the architects seemed to have a fetish for lighting as there are all sorts of trendy incandescent, fluorescent, and LED fixtures everywhere -- what Henry Ryecroft would make of this place. Every seat or sofa, or table -- including the long common-tables with plug-strips running down the center -- is filled with people typing away on laptops. Some even have an array of laptop, tablet, and smartphone before them that they go back and forth between. I have no idea what most of these people are doing. Sometime their work is revealed by their conversation or by a glance at their screens. Some are conducting business of one kind of another, others are coding or maintaining cloud based systems. I suspect it is almost all commerce focused activity, though I do sometimes see people besides myself reading. It’s hard to know if anyone else is writing.

And why am I here, besides the need to get out of the house on occasion? You get a very nice discount on food and drinks if you have an account with the bank and pay with your debit card. Oh, Brave New World...

Next: Spring XIX. A Gathering Storm.

Spring X. Salad days + Age of Ryecroft

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: IX. Independence, forsooth!

Mentally and physically, I must be much older than my years. At three-and-fifty a man ought not to be brooding constantly on his vanished youth. [Gissing was 46 when he died] These days of spring which I should be enjoying for their own sake, do but turn me to reminiscence, and my memories are of the springs that were lost...

On the whole, however, I had nothing much to complain of except my poverty. You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-sixpence a week -- the most I ever could pay for a “furnished room with attendance” in those days of pretty stern apprenticeship... I have been often richly contented in the squalidest garret. One such lodging is often in my memory; it was at Islington, not far from the City Road; my window looked upon the Regent’s Canal. As often as I think of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever knew; for three successive days, at least, my lamp had to be kept burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few blurred lights in the street beyond the Canal, but for the most part nothing but a yellowish darkness, which caused the glass to reflect the firelight and my own face. Did I feel miserable? Not a bit of it. The enveloping gloom seemed to make my chimney-corner only the more cosy. I had coals, oil, tobacco in sufficient quantity; I had a book to read; I had work which interested me; so I went forth only to get my meals at a City Road coffee-shop, and hasten back to the fireside. Oh, my ambitions, my hopes! How surprised and indignant I should have felt had I known of any one who pitied me! ...

Oh, it is wonderful to think of all that youth can endure! What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I remember thirty years ago!

Alpha.

I can play this game, though I moved only rarely, perhaps six times over 20 years. My first room when I moved to the city was tiny with only a window onto a light-well of an old Victorian building of flats, then being rented out by the room. Gissing would have recognized the layout if not the redwood construction. Since I had moved here on the bus with only what I could carry, the small room was about right for my few possessions. I shared a wash room -- merely a small sink set in a marble slab with a small closet to the right holding a hot-plate and a few pans and pots -- with the larger bedroom at the back of the building.

After a matter of months, I moved into the larger bedroom which featured a bay window overlooking the neighborhood and also a gas heating stove. I built a storage unit out of shipping pallets to hold a toaster oven, and there was a very solid little table I used as a desk, also a comfortable upholstered chair I placed near the window. The best thing about the room was that the window faced south so, especially in winter, I could luxuriate in the warmth of the sun on even the coldest (if sunny) days. On summer afternoons I could watch the fog roll in over the hills to the southwest.

In those rooms I had an under-counter size refrigerator, and electric lights of course, but no telephone. To make a phone call, I would use the payphone at a local park on top of the hill.  There was only one, claw footed, tub with a shower hose, shared among the six or seven rooms, but there were two toilets. If there was ever a problem with access to the bath I don’t recall it now... though I do remember that other tenants neglected to clean out the bath when they were finished. From there I eventually moved into a larger apartment across town with a three quarter bath and also a real kitchen with full sized appliances. But I still miss the sun radiating through that window and the expansiveness of the view.

At 62 I am nearly 10 years older than Ryecroft (and still older than Gissing), but if anything I feel younger than my age. In large part this is because I am in the best physical shape of my life. I only wish my body had been in such good shape when I was younger. I know, looking ahead, that age will eventually catch up with me, but I have yet to see any physical evidence of that. I keep expecting to have to reduce my workload, or the weights I lift in the gym, but so far, with the exception of a few instances relating to injuries, I continue to lift more weight and to work harder.

Aside from the back problems I’ve had since high school, I’m mostly fit and healthy. I don’t share the perspective on life of a person (like Gissing, or Proust, or Nietzsche) suffering from chronic disease. This will come up again with regards to Thomas Mann’s fascination with the subject of disease.

Beta.

This might be the place to talk about the world Henry Ryecroft lived in. For one thing, he still lived in the Coal Age, though the Oil Age had technically started in 1901 at Spindletop in Texas. When Gissing was a boy, people believed diseases like Cholera -- which repeatedly swept through Europe and America during his lifetime -- were carried on the wind. The process by which disease is spread was only understood a few decades before the turn of the century, and the resulting public health and sanitation infrastructure and technology was still quite new when this book was published. Darwin published On the Origin of Species when Gissing was two. Bell invented the telephone when he was 19. Edison invented the lightbulb when he was 22.

At the time The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft was published, Einstein was still two years from realizing that matter and energy were basically the same “stuff,” while the Wright brothers were also two years from their first flight, and Henry Ford was seven years from building the first Model T. Women, at this time, could vote in Finland, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and almost nowhere else.

Next: Spring XI. If only...